Avengers: Doomsday hasn’t technically arrived yet, but if you caught “Avengers: Endgame Encore” this past weekend, congratulations — you’ve already watched a chunk of it, awkwardly bolted onto the end of a six-year-old movie like a spoiler stapled to the back of your receipt.
Marvel Studios re-released Avengers: Endgame in theaters on September 25, retitled it “Encore,” and quietly slipped in four new minutes of footage designed to build hype for Avengers: Doomsday, out December 18. One of those new scenes — the Hulk one — has fans convinced it was never meant to live in Endgame at all.
It was supposed to be the post-credits scene for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and somewhere between summer and September, Marvel apparently changed its mind.
Let’s untangle this delightfully messy bit of franchise plumbing, because it’s funnier — and more revealing about how the road to Avengers: Doomsday actually gets built — than it has any right to be.
Wait, What Scene Are We Even Talking About?
“Avengers: Endgame Encore” adds four new scenes that feature Doctor Doom, Loki and Hulk leading up to “Avengers: Doomsday.”
According to Variety, these new scenes were shot during “Doomsday” production and added to the re-release to bridge the two massive “Avengers” stories, with one appearing in the credits, where Bruce is in an underground bunker tinkering on a serum to suppress his Hulking out.
Deadline fills in the gap this scene is patching: the second new clip shows Dr. Bruce Banner in self-containment in a military facility two miles below the surface of the Earth, meaning his green alter ego, The Incredible Hulk, can’t get out — a plan that, this being a superhero movie, works out about as well as every other “containment facility” in cinema history.
Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr., doing double duty as the franchise’s new big bad) shows up to collect him anyway, and per BGR, the audience can’t see, but hears Banner transform into the Hulk before the two depart.
The kicker, and the whole reason this article exists: that scene isn’t set after Endgame’s own story. It’s set after an entirely different movie.
The Scene That Time — and, Apparently, Sony — Forgot
Here’s where it gets good. Multiple outlets independently landed on the same observation: this Hulk scene is a direct sequel to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, not to Endgame. BGR reported that Banner tells fans his recent Hulk incident was the first in a decade, an event likely referring to the transformation that happened in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” when Jean Grey’s psychic control brought a dangerous version of Hulk back.
Deadline put it even more bluntly, noting the second new clip appears to take place post-Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Cosmic Book News confirmed a third scene plays during the credits and picks up with Bruce Banner after Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where Jean Grey took over his mind and Spider-Man had to take the Hulk down, with Bruce turning into the Hulk to face Doom before the scene cuts.
Basically, Marvel took a scene chronologically anchored to Spider-Man’s summer blockbuster and tucked it into the credits of a movie from 2019. That’s the narrative equivalent of writing “Chapter 12” and stapling it to the back of “Chapter 3.”
Fans noticed immediately. A viral post from X user Hernandy D. Uzumaki put the theory in plain terms: “You can tell the Hulk post-credits scene in Endgame Encore was originally meant for Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” drawing replies like one fan saying it “kinda pisses me off” that it wasn’t actually used there.
Ladbible laid out the timeline problem just as plainly, noting that the scene involves the Hulk in containment after being carted away in Brand New Day following his fight with Peter Parker, with Banner revealed in the Spider-Man film to have been living without the Hulk thanks to a “dampener,” only for Jean Grey to break it and free the green monster.
And ScreenRant went ahead and said the quiet part loudly, in a headline literally calling this Avengers: Endgame Encore scene “Marvel Unveils Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s Real Post-Credits Scene 2 Months Later,” arguing that the credits sequence is the coda that Brand New Day was missing, and that while it’s not narratively connected to Hulk’s arc in that movie, Brand New Day not having Encore’s Hulk credits scene is a missed opportunity — because, as the outlet points out, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day could have left fans on an even higher note with this Hulk reveal as its post-credits scene.”
So Why Didn’t It Just Stay in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
This is the part where everyone — myself included — has to shrug theatrically, because Marvel has not issued a press release titled “Here’s Exactly Why We Moved The Hulk Scene, Sorry For The Confusion.” What we do have is educated guessing, and it’s pretty convincing.
ScreenRant’s leading theory: this Hulk credits scene simply wasn’t filmed by the time Brand New Day came out, making it impossible to include there, with Ruffalo potentially only shooting the sequence as part of Doomsday’s additional photography. In other words, this wasn’t a scene cut from Brand New Day for creative reasons — it’s a scene that didn’t exist yet.
Avengers: Doomsday was still shooting, and Marvel apparently decided that once the footage existed, the best home for it wasn’t a delayed digital release of a summer blockbuster, but a splashy theatrical re-release built specifically to gin up excitement for Avengers: Doomsday itself.
Attaching Avengers: Doomsday marketing material to Avengers: Endgame — the film that essentially birthed the modern “event movie” post-credits scene format — is, from a pure hype-engineering standpoint, a pretty savvy move. You get nostalgia and news in the same ninety seconds.
There’s also a thematic argument for why this scene belongs closer to Avengers: Doomsday than to Brand New Day. Cosmic Book News reported that the re-release’s new scenes bring in Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner along with four TVA regulars, with Marvel filming the material during Doomsday production and folding these characters into the December story, and crucially, that the new scenes were taken from Doomsday itself rather than filmed just for the re-release.
That’s a meaningful detail: this isn’t bonus footage invented for a nostalgia cash-grab. It’s actual Avengers: Doomsday material, repurposed as connective tissue. Putting genuine Avengers: Doomsday footage inside “Endgame Encore” turns the re-release into a two-hour, fifty-eight-minute trailer with exceptional production values.
Filmmaker Robert Meyer Burnett was ahead of the official reveal, stating plainly “I do know Hulk and Doom have a new scene together in ENCORE,” while Joe Russo himself described the added material as, in the words of Cosmic Book News’s recap, “a critical companion story” and “required viewing” before Doomsday.
Anthony Russo went further, with Cosmic Book News noting he called the new ending the point where “Doomsday Is Born.” When your own director describes a post-credits scene as the literal birthplace of your next movie, “connective tissue” starts to feel like an understatement — this scene is basically doing pre-production publicity for Avengers: Doomsday while also functioning as a stealth Spider-Man: Brand New Day epilogue. Multitasking, MCU-style.
The Doctor Doom of It All
There’s a bigger reason Marvel might want this scene attached to Endgame rather than Brand New Day: Doom needed to be the one delivering the gut-punch, and Doom’s story is an Avengers: Doomsday story, full stop.
Reactor describes the sequence as Bruce Banner holed up in an underground military facility, explaining via video log that a recent incident involving the Hulk prompted him to isolate himself, before Doom’s voice announces he has come to collect Banner, with offscreen audio suggesting Banner transforms into the Hulk as Doom takes him — to where, exactly, nobody’s saying yet.
ScreenRant argues this nigh confirms one major theory that’s floated around about the Hulk’s prospective role in Avengers: Doomsday — that the Hulk winds up working with or for Doctor Doom in some capacity, which would be an absolutely wild pivot for a guy who spent Endgame becoming the MCU’s most well-adjusted rage monster.
TheDirect adds an unsettling wrinkle, noting Ladbible-style fan theories that Doom is siphoning power from heroes, and reporting that when Empire asked Joe Russo directly about the scene of Doom “collecting” Hulk, Russo said Doom’s “interest may extend beyond just Banner” — the kind of vague, ominous non-answer directors give when they know exactly what they’re teasing for Avengers: Doomsday and would very much like you to keep guessing.
The Bigger Hulk Picture
None of this happens in a vacuum, either. ComicBook.com makes the case that Endgame’s decision to permanently merge Banner and Hulk into “Smart Hulk” was, in hindsight, a misstep given how the character has popped up in other MCU projects since, and that Spider-Man: Brand New Day brings back Hulk’s inner struggle by cracking that merger back open.
Sportskeeda reported ahead of release that Mark Ruffalo was confirmed to return in a significant role, not simply a cameo, with the story arc expected to go beyond a brief mention. So the Hulk-loses-control arc wasn’t a footnote in Brand New Day — it was clearly a real storyline Marvel was building, and the Endgame Encore scene reads like its actual final page, misplaced into the wrong book.
The Takeaway
Is there a smoking gun, a leaked memo, an executive email reading “move Hulk scene from Spidey to Encore, thanks”? No. But when you line up a Variety report, a Deadline breakdown, a Reactor leak analysis, multiple Cosmic Book News updates, two separate ScreenRant pieces, a Ladbible explainer, and a viral fan theory that all independently arrive at the same conclusion — that this scene’s true home was Spider-Man: Brand New Day and it got rerouted to set up Avengers: Doomsday instead — you don’t need a memo.
You need a calendar. The most plausible read is simple: the footage wasn’t ready when Brand New Day hit theaters in July, so Marvel parked it where it would do the most promotional damage closest to release — bolted onto “Avengers: Endgame Encore,” a re-release that exists for one reason and one reason only: convincing you to show up for Avengers: Doomsday in December.
Whatever the real reason, it’s a very on-brand Marvel move — take your fans’ favorite web-slinger’s big moment, and use it to sell tickets to the movie about a guy in a metal mask. Avengers: Doomsday, it turns out, has been quietly recruiting since September.
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